


To Give a Tooth

by kristophine



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, brief mention of spiders, lemon-free I promise, minor gore, should probably mention this isn't like a fetish thing so sorry or you're welcome whichever, teeth are heavily involved, the aftermath of a fight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 05:29:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13675212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kristophine/pseuds/kristophine
Summary: Three loose teeth, a century (give or take) apart.





	To Give a Tooth

**Author's Note:**

> From [here](https://matadornetwork.com/read/mini-guide-russian-slang/): 
> 
> "Rather than making a promise, Russians will 'give a tooth.' Originally it meant 'I’m ready to give you my tooth if this won’t happen.' Some people consider this phrase old-fashioned, others think that it belongs to a prison slang, but it is still used quite often in day to day speech."

_12_

Bucky had been watching with some fascination as the final tardy tooth in Steve’s mouth finally made up its mind to fall out. It was one of the pointy ones on top, and the matching one had only fallen out a little while earlier, so he still had about half a gap there.

They didn’t talk about it much. Steve was sensitive about being a late bloomer—God, Sarah was always saying that, _he’s just a late bloomer, so was his dad,_ like they couldn’t see the picture hung up over the sofa, Joseph A. Rogers. (The A was for Aristotle, Steve confessed once, when Bucky was lying on the couch cushions, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the drunks shouting outside in the sticky-fingered darkness. Granddad Rogers had had a soft spot for the Greeks; Joseph’s older brother had been named Herodotus Aeneas Rogers, a hell of a mouthful to saddle any kid with. He’d died of the influenza when Joseph was a teenager. They had a single picture of Herodotus in his christening gown, grainy and spotted with age, hanging next to Joseph looking so smart in his uniform.)

(Joseph did look smart in his uniform. Bucky was privately of the opinion that you could also tell about how tall Joseph was, and it didn’t look like Steve was going to fall very far from that particular tree. He reserved any voicing of this opinion on the grounds that he didn’t much like fighting Steve.)

Bucky turned thirteen while Steve was still twelve. Steve skipped the party, pleading a stomach-ache, which Bucky knew meant he couldn’t afford a present, but hell if Bucky knew how to tell him that it was okay—anyway, the other guys might have said something about it, so it wasn’t like Steve was wrong.

He snuck in the Rogers’ window through the fire escape that night when he was supposed to be asleep. Steve was sitting up by the time he got in, with his arms crossed and a smile struggling not show through his glare as Bucky slipped through his bedroom door and sat cross-legged at the foot of his bed. The lights outside wavered, came and went, but there was enough to have a sort of a sense of each other by.

“Heard you a mile away,” Steve whispered. Sarah would be fast asleep one thin wall over; they barely breathed while they spoke.

“Yeah, well, I wanted to make sure you could wish me happy birthday.” Bucky grinned, pushing a lock of hair out of his eye.

 “Happy birthday, you big lug.”  Steve reached out and shoved him. “Here.”

He tossed something into Bucky’s lap. It was a bag of candies—not the kind of thing Steve could give him in front of the kids whose parents could afford real toys, but just right for the two of them.

“Thankf,” mumbled Bucky, already sucking on a lemon drop.

Steve made a particular face when he was working on the tooth. He started doing it, the little jabs of his tongue at the odd tooth out.

There had been something, lately; an odd pressing feeling, like it was getting hard to breathe, when Bucky looked at Steve. He hadn’t said anything to anyone. He hadn’t dared. He didn’t know how to put words to it, anyway. It was a whispery thing that felt like a pressure to be closer to Steve, so he sat further away, out of reach.

“Do I get a birthday kiss?”

Steve laughed soundlessly. He leaned forward and kissed Bucky on the cheek, and in that split second, the warmth and smell of him made Bucky’s cheeks heat up like branding irons.

“I got to go. Ma’ll notice I’m gone soon.”

“Yeah, see you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

The whole walk home, sticking to shadows and dodging the bitter-faced men still out and about, Bucky kept thinking about how hot his cheek still felt.

He still didn’t have any good answers.

 

_19_

“God damn it, those fuckers—”

“Just—”

“I know, I know.” Steve’s mouth had settled into a thin, angry line. He dabbed the washcloth into the bowl of cool water and kept patting around Bucky’s mouth. When Bucky was in a mood, sometimes he’d tease Steve for having a nurse mother turning him into a nursemaid; tonight, he was just glad for Steve’s steady hands.

“Just a bad night,” said Bucky again. He’d been repeating himself. He needed Steve not to ask.

“Seems funny to be on this side of it.” Steve squeezed some water out of the cloth, rinsing more of the blood off Bucky’s split lip. “What possessed you?”

Bucky shrugged without speaking.

Steve frowned at him and tried to get some more of the blood off before sighing and taking the bowl to the sink. “You’re going to look like shit tomorrow.”

“Don’t I usually?”

“Not this bad.”

Bucky touched his lip and winced. “Yeah, guess so.”

“Any loose teeth?”

Bucky probed his gums with his tongue; one of his canines seemed a little wobbly. “Yeah. Just one. It’ll be fine.” It would probably—hopefully—be fine.

“Don’t want to spoil that fine smile of yours,” said Steve, his back to Bucky and the water running.

“I do have a lovely smile.” Bucky drummed his fingers on the edge of the table, but had to stop when they hurt, too—he’d gotten in a good swing or three, and the guy had left him alone. Not fast enough to save Bucky a fat lip, though. He was lost in thought about whether this was going to mean spending good money on the dentist when Steve’s voice broke in again.

“Where’d it happen?”

Bucky had known Steve was going to ask that. He should have had a better lie lined up. He should have thought of _something._ Instead, he just stared at Steve for a moment that stretched on too long, spinning out like threads off blown glass.

“Buck.” Steve’s voice was too serious, too grave. Steve set the rinsed bowl down gingerly and came back to the table, pulling out the chair, sitting down as carefully as if he was sitting on eggshells. “You—you know you can _tell_ me.”

Bucky couldn’t look away from Steve’s face, so finely molded, angelic in the flickering light of the oil lamp.

“Down by Patsy’s,” he heard himself say.

Steve blinked, like an owl. “The—”

“Yeah.”

“Were you—”

“Yeah.”

Steve’s cheeks puffed out with air; he blew it out in a big breath. “Oh.”

“You can’t—” Bucky stopped. Of course Steve wasn’t going to _tell_ anyone, Christ, what would that make _him?_

“You go there,” said Steve, like he was testing out the words.

“There are things I need I can’t get from you.” His didn’t know he was going to sound so harsh until he said it. He felt dizzy.

Steve stared at him. Bucky looked away, searching out the little things in the kitchen that made it so familiar: the big crack in the white enamel of the sink, the crocheted rug Sarah put down by the door, with their shoes tumbled to the side of it.

“You so sure about that,” said Steve.

Bucky put his hand back on the edge of the table. The room was swimming, the shimmering lamplight making it all feel hazy and unreal; Steve was standing up, the legs of the chair scraping hard on the floor, and then Steve’s hand was in his hair, tugging until there were swarming stinging pinpoints all over his scalp.

“You _sure,_ ” whispered Steve, right in his ear, and Steve swung a leg over Bucky’s lap to straddle him.

Bucky heard himself moan as Steve kissed him: moaning from pain, from Steve’s mouth on Bucky’s bloody lips, from the hand Steve had kept in his hair, pulling and twisting. He was light-headed and hard.

Steve’s tongue touched Bucky’s loosened tooth, snaked around it in a decidedly un-sensual kind of way, but Bucky couldn’t help it; it was like he’d been living in the dark, and now somebody had decided to set off all the fireworks in China for him.

“You dumb son of a bitch,” Steve murmured into his ear. Bucky moaned again, dropping his hands to hold Steve’s ass, hold him up on the chair, on Bucky’s lap.

Steve kissed him again—took his hand out of Bucky’s hair to smack him on the back of the head, whispered, “ _quiet,_ ” when Bucky couldn’t help the sounds he made—and then took that free hand, grabbed one of Bucky’s, and put Bucky’s hand square on Steve’s cock.

Bucky squeezed, half on instinct. Steve sighed, a trailing, heavy sound, so Bucky did it again, and then he couldn’t stand it and had to dig in through Steve’s buttons, until he could get one hand wrapped around Steve’s cock. Steve tried to keep kissing him, but the rhythm of Bucky’s strokes threw him, until he was shaking with his forehead pressed against Bucky’s, coming and coming, while Bucky’s lungs gave up on him.

“Oh, Jesus.” Bucky felt like wailing. He couldn’t wait another minute, he _couldn’t_ —and Steve, sweet merciful God, rubbed Bucky’s cock through his trousers; Bucky gave it up right then, before Steve could even get at his belt.

Steve kissed him again.

The taste of blood in his mouth and the hum of pain were nothing, nothing at all.

 

_35 (50? 28? 102?)_

“You motherfucking idiot son of a bitch,” Bucky said, “I can’t fucking believe you, do you have any sense of self-preservation whatsoever, you know what, I’ll take a number and wait while you think about answering that—”

“Yasha, shut _up._ ” Natasha threw a tube of chapstick at him from the back seat. “I’m very sure he’s sorry.”

“ _Are_ you? Because you know what, I would really rather hear it from _him_ —”

“I’m very sorry,” said Steve. It came out a little mangled, because he’d gone and busted the whole side of his face. The whole right side, scraped up by the pavement. “Now shut your yap.”

“It’ll be an easy mission, Bucky, he said! No problems anticipated, he said! And what do we find?”

“We were all _there,_ Buck.” Steve pulled down the visor on the passenger side and peered into the mirror, poking at his enormous black eye.

“We find some kind of _mutant mega spider breeding lab,_ and you just _had_ to try to follow that son of a bitch on a motorcycle—”

“I’m going to be _fine_ in twenty minutes—”

Natasha whacked the back of Bucky’s head. “He’s going to be fine, he’s got the serum.”

“Is that a _tooth hanging out of your mouth?_ ”

“It’s just a little loose! I don’t remember you ever being this much of a wet blanket when we were kids.”

“Yeah, well—” They had to stop for a red light. Bucky turned to keep yelling at Steve and saw Steve looking at him with a familiar, wild light in his eyes. He swallowed. “What?”

“Remember,” said Steve, voice gone low and smoky, “that time you got roughed up outside Patsy’s?”

“Oh, Jesus.” With a pang he let go of his incandescent fury, and leaned over to kiss Steve, just the once, hard and fast.

“Save it for later! Like maybe after I’m _dead!_ ” shouted Natasha behind them, slapping Bucky on the shoulder. “Green, go, go, go!”

Bucky pulled away and hit the accelerator. In the distant rearview, something with too many legs was looming into sight, but all told, he’d had worse days.


End file.
